Author Archives: Kars

PLAY Pilots is live

We’ve launched a first version of PLAY Pilots; a web site we’ve been working on the past few months. It is the next phase of our engagement with the city of Utrecht on cultural innovation through play, which I alluded to in this post.1 At this point, the site allows you to see what custom-made [...]
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So yeah we’ve moved

If you look in the footer of this website, or on its contact page, you’ll see a new address. Neude 5, Utrecht, NL. We’ve been happy renters at the Dutch Game Garden for almost two years now so when they announced their move to a new location of course we wanted to stick with them [...]
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Join us for a game of Bocce Drift

So we have five sets of bocce balls lying around (or jeu de boules, as we like to call the game in the Netherlands). They’re left over from our little stint at NU Grounds. We were planning to run Bocce Drift there, but did not get around to it. So let’s play it anyway, in [...]
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Games we ran at NU Grounds

On a scorchingly hot Saturday afternoon several agents of Hubbub descended on the Utrecht area of Leidsche Rijn to run a number of physical social games at the NU Grounds festival. We played a mix of games designed by students of the Utrecht School of the Arts and games taken from the excellent Ludocity website. [...]
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You don’t put a game in a computer; my first column for Bashers

Here’s the first column I’ve written for Bashers, the premier source of games journalism in the Netherlands. I’m planning to devote subsequent columns to discussions of other pervasive games. Many thanks to Niels ‘t Hooft for indulging me. Do you know a game called Cruel 2 B Kind? It works like this: the goal is [...]
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An interview with Kars in a book on Utrecht creatives

A few weeks ago Xpert CMKB presented a book on creative entrepeneurs in the city of Utrecht at Kunstgras 2010. I’m quite flattered to have an interview with myself included. Below are photos of the pages in question with links to high resolution shots on Flickr.1 Read about why I started Hubbub and what it [...]
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Slides and notes for ‘The City Is My Games Console’ at CIID

A few weeks ago I had the pleasure of doing an open lecture at CIID; the Copenhagen Institute for Interaction Design. Below you’ll find a selection of the slides I used, plus a rough transcript of what I said.1 Not included is arguably the most fun part of the afternoon, which was a playtest of [...]
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Join us for playful meanderings through Leidsche Rijn this saturday

I’ve always found neighborhoods under construction curious places. There is a strange tension between the place as planned and the place as executed and subsequently lived in. Leidsche Rijn is a new neighborhood being built in Utrecht (which is my hometown and also where Hubbub’s studio is located). When it is finished in 2025 it [...]
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Upcoming lecture on pervasive games at CIID

Finally, I get to lecture at my favorite interaction design institute, the CIID. If you’re in the Copenhagen area, do come along. Here’s the description: It seems that the brave new playful world promised by pervasive/urban/locative/alternate-reality games mavens of the past decade hasn’t really materialized. Gaming hasn’t left the living room much, it still mostly [...]
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Making cultural events more playful

These are sketches from a presentation that I delivered a while back to a room full of organizers of cultural events and creative agencies from Utrecht. This was the culmination of a study commissioned by the city of Utrecht, in which we looked at ways of adding playful elements to the programs of some of [...]
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